Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2802618

1527-1900

Philip Brenner,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

Eagerly awaited by scholars of Cuban foreign policy, African politics, and US-Cuban relations, the second volume of Piero Gleijeses's study of Cuba's engagement in Africa during the Cold War does not disappoint. While not quite a tour de force, Visions of Freedom provides the most thoroughly researched and detailed account of the conflicts in southern Africa during a critical 15-year period that led to relatively stable postcolonial regimes and an end to apartheid.Gleijeses gained unprecedented access to Cuban military, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Communist Party Central Committee archives, which yielded 15,000 pages of documents. He also scoured available archival sources in the United States, Angola, South Africa, Zambia, Britain, Germany, France, and Italy. As he notes throughout the book, he cross-checked many documents during his more than 150 interviews with key actors in the relevant countries, at times to appreciate the context and significance of a document or to challenge a respondent's account of an event. As a result, in several instances he is able to provide multiple perspectives about an event, deepening our understanding of why it unfolded as it did.Consider, for example, the May 1978 attack in Zaire by Katangan exiles. Cuban president Fidel Castro had learned three months earlier about preparations for the invasion. Fearing it could provide a pretext for “the imperialists … to launch an open attack on Angola” (quoted on p. 55), he strongly urged Angolan president Agostinho Neto to stop the Katangans. Two days after the invasion, Castro personally informed the chief US diplomat in Cuba about his warning to Neto. Yet White House officials chose not to believe Castro, and they ordered the State Department spokesperson to assert that Cuba had prepared and armed the Katangans for the Zaire invasion. The acrimonious exchanges that followed contributed to the renewed hostility that was emerging between the two capitals.Visions of Freedom provides compelling evidence that discredits several conventional explanations of the period. With respect to South Africa, for example, it demonstrates that Pretoria decided to give up its control of Namibia and to allow free elections in large part because Cuban victories and Cuba's “more aggressive strategy on the battlefield reversed the military situation” (pp. 508–9). This produced an increasing number of white South African casualties, which the apartheid government worried would undermine morale among its supporters. Gleijeses reports that other explanations — such as reduced South African fear of Soviet aggression or concern that a Democratic victory in the 1988 US presidential elections would lead to more sanctions if Pretoria did not relent on Namibia — are not substantiated by the documentary record.With respect to Cuba, many analysts have long claimed that tense US-Cuban relations were the result of Fidel Castro's preference to maintain the United States as an enemy in order to bolster his own legitimacy and power. Gleijeses agrees that “Cuba's intervention to defend Ethiopia from the Somali invasion ended the tentative rapprochement between Washington and Havana” (p. 119). But he points to Castro's attempts to assuage US concerns in proposing that the two countries maintain high-level communications, which led to five secret meetings in 1978. The Cuban leader's purpose in these meetings, Castro told Neto, was “to end the embargo against Cuba” (quoted on p. 119). Indeed, as a gesture of goodwill in mid-1978, Cuba informed the United States that it would be releasing nearly all its political prisoners.Gleijeses makes explicit in this book a theme that was only implicit in his earlier study Conflicting Missions (2002). Cuba's selfless sense of “a duty to help other countries,” he argues, “is at the core of the Cuban revolution” (p. 526). From 1963 to 1991, he reports, 386,000 Cuban soldiers served abroad, with 337,000 of them in Angola. In addition, Cuba sent 43,000 aid workers to Angola. US officials either could not comprehend such idealism or could not accept a small country playing the international role they believed was reserved for the United States alone, shaping history in lands far from home. The missions of the two countries were bound to conflict.In effect, the clearly written story in Visions of Freedom unfolds as if it were a predetermined plot, which is a weakness that makes the book less than fully satisfying. Despite Gleijeses's prodigious efforts to obtain information about Cuban decisions, his account does not provide enough detail about the debates within the Cuban leadership over the decisions they made. This is most egregious with respect to Ethiopia, where the book devotes two paragraphs to the dilemma Cuba faced in militarily supporting the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, which was brutally suppressing Eritrean separatists whom the Cubans previously had aided and trained (p. 325).Still, until more archival material becomes available, Visions of Freedom should stand as a standard reference for any examination of the hot wars in Africa, where a significant part of the cold war between the superpowers played out.